I wash my hands of the stuff of legends.
And what news of the horizon?
I hear it's all just a horizontal myth,
so stop your cruising, start your criticizing!
The world woke up one day to proclaim:
"Thou shalt not take part in, or make, bad art."
In these tough, tough times friends like mine would rather dash than dine
on the bones of what's thrown to them...

-Destroyer, "The Bad Arts"

Send a music writer to review an art event and you can expect song lyrics as an epigraph. Not that they're an inappropriate form for the occasion. To a pretty large extent, song lyrics have taken over the social function that was occupied by poetry in previous eras: providing words to live by, quotable quotes and epithets. Hence the decline in the popularity and quality of contemporary verse. You can look to the much-maligned practice of slam poetry as the form's desperate attempt to leverage some viability by using strategies borrowed from pop music. After all, a poetry slam is basically a rap battle without a DJ. Or any street cred.

By similar lights, contemporary art, while not in decline by any means, has to contend with a small audience and general confusion about its social function and cultural relevance. During a festival like SWARM, in which a diverse crowd - artists, students, educators, glitterati, hangers-on, and hipsters of all stripes - hits the street to see what's going on in the city's galleries and studios, the question of what contemporary art is and what it might be good for generally remains unasked and unanswered. At best, it's taken for granted: looking at art (and potentially buying it, an activity usually reserved for those more affluent than the readers of this publication) is for pleasure, for education, for cultural cachet (i.e. legitimizing your snobbery), or simply for making money (fairly rare around these parts). In most cases, it's simply a form of entertainment like any other.

The tradition we have in this city, though, is Conceptualism -- specifically, photo-conceptualism. What that means is that "important" and "advanced" art in this city has generally been thought of in terms of ethical and aesthetic imperatives derived from radical politics. Good art in Vancouver is expected to be "critical art", to rise above the status of merely consumable products and offer reflections on culture and power relations that art is especially enabled to provide by virtue of its autonomy: unlike cinema (many art professionals, I've noticed, have a low opinion of the movies) or TV or pop music, art is ostensibly created in a space free of commercial motives. It gets to occupy a privileged objective position from which to examine the rest of culture. These are all fairly admirable ends, but the fact is that in our age of postmodern pluralism, what passes for ethical imperatives and critical discourse tends to be lamentably weak, and all too often, "advanced" art is merely a style (of obscurity, inscrutability, detachment, sterility, and rebarbative pretension) that serves to reinforce the authority and territory of art over and above the rest of everyday aesthetic experience. In other words, by keeping art exclusive, art professionals legitimize their jobs, and an awful lot of contemporary art -- especially in Vancouver -- seems to be made mainly to give critics an excuse to mobilize their arsenal of artspeak.

There are plenty of alternatives, of course: you can go for "low" art, or subcultural art, or sound works and new media art. You can do the comic-book thing, you can present yourself as a designer or illustrator or architect rather than an artist per se, and you can embrace and/or accept art as a commodity. The dangers here are mainly naivete, nihilism, superficiality and commercialism, though in these days of rampant merchandising, licensing, and corporate collabs, accusations of "sell-out!" don't really scare a lot of people anymore.

Seeing as SWARM is a project of the Pacific Association of Artist-Run Centres, and arguably not affiliated with any "establishment" art organs, a lot of the work on display falls into the second (i.e. "alternative") category, with the exception of a few shows at venues like Artspeak, Access and (maybe) Helen Pitt. My first beef, though was with a show at a venue that wasn't officially part of SWARM, the Contemporary Art Gallery. Chris Gergley's Copy Work and Gobo (photographs and slides projections, respectively), while not entirely unappealing in some respects, generally embody the opaque, reference-heavy style of Vancouver heavyweights like Jeff Wall and Ron Terada without the rigour of the former and with all the too-easy smugness of the latter. It was appropriationist strategy without a strong point or any really exceptional photographs, and the effect of work like this is is not to destabilize established meaning in any productive way, but simply to perform further work of erosion on meaning in general. In showing a slide projection of Ron Terada's Big Star (itself borrowed from the band Big Star's cover art), Gergley is sucking blood from a parasite, and let me tell you, the yield is low. The best thing that I could say about it is that there's a couple of portraits in Copy Work of people who look like they'd be fun to hang out with.

NIGHT ONE: MOUNT PLEASANT / DOWNTOWN / GRANVILLE ISLAND

Thursday, Sept 6

So, getting around to actually talking about official SWARM exhibits, I started at the Or gallery, just a couple blocks from the CAG. Here, Cedric and Nathan Bomford had used scrap wood salvaged from their families' yards to construct what they claimed was a "loose reference" to the 1927 wilderness compound of "Brother XII", a Vancouver Island cult leader whom the Bomfords learned of through records passed on by their great-great uncle. Or so they claim, anyway. If the story's true, they don't offer a lot of details, and if it's a fabrication, it's not very interesting. The upshot is that they built a wooden cabin, a balcony railing, and a sort of pulpit inside the gallery that you can explore at your leisure. Watch out for splinters and dust, though. I got some weird crap on my jeans from sitting on a wooden railing that I still haven't identified. Whether they intended the show to be appreciated for its sculptural properties, or as a social space (the art is your social encounters and potential hangouts) in the relational aesthetics sense is unclear. There were only a couple people there when I arrived, and none of us stuck around too long.

Up at Gallery 42 on Main Street, Dina Gonzalez Mascaro was showing some paintings and sculpture that referenced urban development and globalization with a visual language that was equal parts graffiti and abstract expressionism. Not hip enough for the kids and not serious enough for the Academy, I had to feel a little sorry for Mascaro: she's just not going to get a lot of attention.

Kayla Guthrie, however, is getting tons. When I arrived at Blim to see her show, Personalities, Kayla was standing atop a yellow ladder reading her poetry (a Beat-esque stew of angsty diaristic confessional and psychedelic imagery that sounded more than anything like Kim Gordon lyrics) and there were so many people in attendance that I had to stand outside to listen. Once the reading ending, the crowd dispersed a bit and I could get inside to see Kayla's scuptures, an array of brightly-coloured, paint-splattered paper-mache abstractions that looked like a cross between Claes Oldenburg's soft pop sculptures and Flintstones home furnishings. In a crude way, they could pass for surrealist psychological diagrams from the dreams of a woman who spent a lot of time with Lisa Frank in her childhood and Black Dice in her adulthood, and they definitely comprise the most ambitious attempt to make use of Blim as an installation site that I've seen to date. The artist's statement for Personalities, a zine-ish collection of photocopied poetry and doodles, reads like an uncommonly good example of the stuff you might write down while stoned: naive, pretentious, and sloppily nonlinear, but occasionally burning with scraps of nude truth. At any rate, I liked it better than Kayla's installation in the Helen Pitt's back gallery at last year's SWARM.

Up at Lucky Comics, whose gallery is curated by Lief Hall, I found two sets of drawings by the always-pleasing Lee Hutzulak, best known for his resolutely quiet and low-key experimental music and, more recently, his really excellent poster art for the improvised music events that Father Zosima was organizing at the Access gallery. Like his music, Hutzulak's drawings tend to be fragile and quirky, with lots of white space. Principally executed in felt marker and ink, his dreamlike and collagistic images of disembodied limbs, minimal figures, and cloudy swarms of abstract colour are always accompanied by evocative titles. His drawings propose a modest scale, but always succeed in surprisingly large terms, readily comparable to such masters of miniature surrealism as Odilon Redon and Max Ernst.

The highlight of my night, however (and here I should probably list all the venues I didn't visit: The Grunt Gallery, Main Space, The Jem Gallery, Video In, Open Studios, and the Malaspina Printmaker's Society), was definitely the installation at the Western Front by Tokyo-based artist, performer, sculptor, and musician Ujino Muneteru. There was an actual musical performance at 8pm that I missed for lack of will to pony up the ten bucks (What can I say? I was a poor student, and now that I'm done with school, I'm even poorer), but after coming back down to 8th Avenue later in the evening, I was thrilled that I didn't miss this amazing work. In the Western Front's big upstairs hall, appealingly carpeted and wood-paneled and not at all white cube-y, Muneteru had constructed three large musical automatons of ingenious design. Each one was based on a turntable on which the arm was replaced by an array of switches that were struck, as the record revolved, by a series of pegs hammered into the vinyl. Aside from making a kind of click-track, these turntables regulated the flow of electricity to a series of gadgets on tables: household objects like hair dryers, vacuums, and power drills were modified and set atop guitar pickups that were connected to giant speaker cabinets. So, for a split-second at a time, each device would start up and shut off, generating a series of hums, buzzings, and whirrs that boomed out of the bass cabs to form a weird kind of analog glitch techno, accompanied by flashes of light from antique fixtures that Muneteru had added to the assemblages and rigged to flicker in time with the music. Far from being some kind of interesting but unlistenable racket, the music is actually really warm, groovy, and positively danceable. Maybe the most effective of the pieces was the one hooked up to derelict clock radios and boomboxes, whose primitive graphic displays flickered faintly as the contraption sampled the airwaves. Not just a delightful curiosity, Muneteru's installation is an affecting paean to the potentially infinite lives of everyday objects and the melancholy reminisces of consumer products about their journey through design, disuse, and reanimation. By making music and sculptures that embody a far-reaching reflection on technology and consumption, Muneteru managed to do what few, if any, other artists at SWARM did: he married aesthetic seduction to interesting contemporary issues.

<p>Most of the shows at SWARM are up for at least another week or two, so go have a look. You can check the details <a href="http://www.paarc.ca/swarm"> here </a>. Watch this space for reviews of nights two and three, coming soon.</p>